Since then I've come to the conclusion that it's never worthwhile to buy crypto with fiat. Any scheme which asks that of its users creates too much continuity between the old way and the new way--it allows the illegitimately rich to continue to be illegitimately rich even after switching to the new system. Anything with that property doesn't deserve to be the new system.
What we need is a discontinuity. A system that wants not your money, but your participation, and which doesn't acknowledge the value of your old money. Today's crypto isn't it.
The quickest route to profitability had something to do with solving problems in ways that--by happenstance--let them stay solved. This is relevant since profitability is how banks decide whether to grant a loan, and loans are what cause USD to enter the system. Previously, we mostly had good reason to want people's ventures to succeed.
But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures that have more to do with capturing a share of some fixed resource (attention/influence mostly), or building something that helps some of us at the expense of others (missiles, datacenters, planned obsolescence, surveillance, etc). It's no longer clear whether we're better off with the success or failure of a randomly chosen business venture. Maybe that venture seeks to harm us.
The quickest route to profitability has changed. Now it's about making things worse for the many while benefiting the few (since it's the few who have all the money). Yet we're still treating dollars as valuable despite the fact that they're issued on the basis of profitability, a property that no longer has much to do with making our lives better.
So I think we need a system that understands consent. When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor I need to be able to look at it and decide whether accpepting it helps people who are helping me, or whether it helps people who want to poison my drinking water for their mining endeavor. Dollars don't carry enough information to enable me to make that decision, and so far neither does crypto.
We don't have to banish scarcity entirely before building monetary systems that are not based on it. Once we figure out the better way, it'll likely be crypto-shaped, except it won't ask you to buy it, it'll just ask you to use it. It'll be a rejection of the old ideas about value.
The entire field of crypto was an attempt to create scarcity where none existed, by turning scarce electricity into special numbers.
I remember here on HN 10 years ago everybody wanted to put everything on a blockchain. Some were betting on the collapse of the financial system.
None of those things happened but ethereum created a neutral, stable, secure cheap and transparent programmable financial platform.
Because it is neutral a lot of people ported the bad things happening in the traditional financial system to crypto: the scams, debt, speculation, etc.
And then most people started to hate it.
I guess 20 years ago most porn was hosted on Apache web servers, now it would be nginx. Should we hate nginx because of porn?
The notion that people gravitate to metal vs "fractional sheep" is without historical evidence. People in fact, a long time ago, did trade things like IOUs or pieces of broken reeds or sticks[2]. Those sticks acted like IOUs and were often traded around far past the original parties to the contract.
Money is a contract between you, your peer/counterparty, and whatever organization you "trust" to mediate if someone really isn't happy with the outcome of a situation.
Money is, indeed, culture.
[1] https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-iv-of-the-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO.
NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received
Would one argue that an airplane is a _story_ ? If no one believed in the technology and lost faith in all pilots no one would fly. But that doesn't change the reality of the technology and competence of the pilots.
I get the sentiment, but I am not sure _story_ is the right word.
From what I last heard about crypto miners, the price of mining is not enough to justify price of rig + electricity, so they are quietly switching to AI.
Wonder how long the second scam will last.
The public never believed it because it runs squarely into the basic fundamentals that underpin the global financial system.
The finance industry learned long ago that currencies have to be stable and predictable in order to be trusted, and therefore NOT financial instruments to speculate heavily on. There's been this reality distortion field that crypto can be both a currency and speculative asset, but that hasn't borne out. If your digital dollar can gain/lose 5% of its value in a day, how do you trust it to transact with?
Crypto has been speed-running into many lessons we learned decades ago from the "Free Banking" era before the Fed, back when states ran their own banks, currencies, etc. Government got involved in banking management as a way to improve the stability and security of the financial system since things like fraud were rampant.
In my view the actual issue has always been that cryptocurrency folks don't understand what purpose money serves, mostly because they're all basically gold bugs. To strain the "money is a technology" metaphor, this is a product-market-fit issue -- like trying to build a cloud orchestration framework that only works on DIY Belwulf clusters or a web framework that only looks nice on teletype.
You get in on the speculative promise of making yourself wealthy. It's sold to you by the people at the top, and the message is amplified by the grifters and the pick mes in their orbit.
It's never been a convenient exchange of money. If they'd focused on this, maybe the argument would have worked. Instead, it's wacky and has the worst UX of any banking apparatus in the world. Including giant US banks stuck in 2005. This sucks because this is literally the value being sold, and it doesn't deliver on it at all.
By the time quantum chips can attack crypto's underlying hardness (2029?), most of the coins won't have the engineering talent and support left to migrate to more secure cryptography. We'll start seeing shit coins popped left and right, which will cause mass panic. That will cause sell offs, even if the big name brands manage to secure themselves temporarily.
Low-life businessmen ruined the technology outside of some spaces where there is strong tech leadership. They did too much damage to reputation of the whole industry
They did the same butchering to LLM/AI tech.
Money was always the point.
It's pretty hard to really lock people out of stable coins really. You really just need someone to sell you some type of cryptocurrency that can be eventually exchanged for stablecoins. You can even do "peer to peer" trades if the government really cracks down on holding crypto.
I agree with the sentiment of this article but atleast some parts of the world with poor currencies like Latam have seen some benefit from stbales.
The markets hasnt accepted that. In gaza the cost of using crypto for foreign exchange far exceeded the cost of using cash, or prederably a US bill.
People just simply trust paper bills in developing areas
Combined with effective accelerationism[1] you can see why we could be heading towards somewhere a whole lot worse than The Bad Place.
You're in Crimea right now. You want some gasoline. You have some magic numbers in your magic rock. It needs you to cast a spell to transmit those magic numbers to someone else. I guess it probably also needs ... some electricity and some network access and some time to make those magic numbers update in the gas station's magic number.
In what way is this actually going to help you in a total collapse? Let's stand around over my iphone and cold wallet and spacex terminal while we wait for things to beep the right number of beeps?
In the off-chance you find yourself in this situation, what's to stop the party with the gasoline from just pointing a gun at you or your corgi and asking you to add some zeros to the number of magic beans you're zapping into their magic number?
Now, perhaps you as an international agent of mystery, can use some shiny rocks or magic pieces of paper to make your escape, and you can then, once safely back in a stable society, use your magic numbers and spells to transfer "wealth" to some organization closer to your new physical location (let's say belize?) -- in which case, to avoid a bunch of tedious laws and such, perhaps that magic trick will work in the way you suggest.
But, when things go haywire and there's just Hobb's all against all, I'm not sure a magic cold wallet of certificates is going to do much.
Trump and the general rise of Populism is not the cause of the fall of Western democracies, it is a consequence.
This is revisionism. That is not at all how it started.
Meh, it's arbitrage against slow moving financial regulations.
There are times when financial regulations are "bad" in a way that this trait is desireable - i.e. your failing institutions use case - but in many cases these regulations are, actually, there for a reason.
And now in practice crypto transactions for "normal" people are performed by bank-like institutions who log every transaction anyway, so this characteristic is really only valuable to the people deeply involved in the crypto world who are using it mainly to do "normal" crimes.
My only take away with crypto is, think of that one movie "In Time" but instead of the whole time = currency concept and the arm clock, what if crypto could be applied to a physical piece of e-paper like thing, where it says what its worth, and its worth what it says, you can transfer it on a whim from the paper to your phone (to a wallet) and back and forth.
If anyone figured that out, fully seamlessly, fault tolerant, that alone imho would be worth investing time and attention into.
Basically make the crypto real and physical, something fluidly tangible to where everyone can hold it and understand it.
No one can hack your wallet if all your "crypto" is not in it. You can spin up new wallet on a whim.
The only real way I can think is something like how monero works, where whoever owns a coin can "decrypt" said coin (or that's my limited understanding of how monero works).
> It's actually riskier in every meaningful way
That statement is only true to you, not everyone.
Re: privacy though, there's many solutions. Single tailored chains for privacy, mixers, encrypted tokens, permissioned chains, etc.
In my experience, privacy, while important, is not something users actually care about enough to demand a solution for. Most web3 users today just want to degen and gamble, and they're okay with KYC to do so.
Some nice loss harvesting in the past will help with some other financial moves down the road. I'm definitely checking in now and then, but mostly see it as background noise.
The logical conclusion of this train of thought (which I agree with) is that people who heavily invested in crypto may significantly benefit from weakening strong currencies and institutions. Make of that what you will.
I was trying to send some money to my parents the other day and it’s still slow and expensive.
Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end.
If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by your perspective. But once you try to move money between continents, even with ID and documentation, you’ll understand that Coinbase is a godsend.
> ACH, most bank does not allow send to stranger, and it takes 1~3 days for settlement among those which allow.
> Wire, expensive ~$30 per transaction.
> Paypal/Venmo/CashApp, Schrödinger's fraud trigger you never know it's gonna work or not. Plus they report to IRS so more paperwork during tax season.
> A lot of banks report every transaction of your checking account to credit bureaus.
So stable coin is my preferred way, and luckily among my circle it is widely accepted. Any amount is instant with a few cents fee at most.
You’ll generally have the conversion slippage and transaction fee regardless - so the difference is the second conversion.
In practice, that isn’t too expensive and worth it for the speed; though that may change if you’re sending larger or smaller amounts than I am (in $1k-10k range).
Edit:
Replying by edit due to rate limits — but subcontracting and personal loans, eg, until a client pays.
Being a consultant is hard; being a consultant with no support network is harder.
Credit risk and identity dictate the speed of the funding step. If you stripped KYC out of the equation entirely, the bottleneck wouldn't just be speed — the legacy banking system would refuse to route the transaction at all.
It is important to distinguish that you are fundamentally involved in a credit network, pulling funds not pushing funds, that just gives the illusion of speed. For verified users, the sub-minute speed is a mix of local real-time banking rails and Wise extending short-term trust that the incoming funds won't bounce. For an unverified or high-risk user, Wise forces a holding period until the money physically clears, dragging the process back down to standard banking speeds.
Never had much of a need for other services when transferring across the globe.
The existing "credit card" infrastructure is not designed to compete with that.
Now some actors like Paypal could have come up with an HTTP 402 standard and implementation 25 years ago but they never did. I am not sure why.
> Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat.
Especially as an EU citizen: in the EU it is illegal, by law, to have stablecoin yield. So for example the HN unicorn Coinbase can give 3.5% yield annualized (or whatever the current yield is), automatically, to anyone in the US that owns USDC. But in the EU the very same Coinbase is forbidden, by law, from giving the same yield on the exact same USDC.
Now I'm not saying the yield on EUR on a EUR bank account is exciting: what I'm saying is holding a currency losing to insane inflation and which doesn't give anything back is wild.
And it's only for stablecoins: for example as an EU citizen on my brokerage account, where I have real USDs, they automatically yield when they're idling.
So it's not that you cannot get yield on currencies in the EU: it's the way they categorized stablecoins.
Now as I understand it there are ways to get yield on stablecoins in "smart contracts" but that's another can of worms for IIUC atm there have been scams upon scams upon hacks upon thefts upon neverending shenanigans.
So yup: stablecoins as an EU citizen, not good.
"money market fund". If they're yielding, they're holding bonds. Normally this distinction doesn't matter, but we're deep into financial plumbing here.
Cryptocurrencies have a great and really boring application. You have to think "who needs a reliable ledger distributed among many entities?"
The answer is institutional banks the likes of JPMorgan. They have a few cryptocurrencies, you need to be another large bank to use them. Big banks send each other large sums of money constantly back and forth. In no sense do they send each other "real" money, it's just accounting... a ledger.
"Cryptocurrencies" are better thought of as mathematically proven accounting software than money. Plenty of organizations need to be able to keep track of money is between a collection of mostly-trusted peers. With cryptocurrencies they can ditch a lot of the transaction and accounting software.
cryptocurrencies are the ledger software, API, and data store layer -- and you do need trust between peers because the JPMorgan will take actions to reverse transactions if there are problems that need fixing.
It's not magical, but it is convenient for the actual ledger actions to be mathematically proven instead of the result of accounting rules in code.
"Real money" these days is exactly that, i.e. accounting entries on a ledger, and has been for the better part of the past century or so.
> Plenty of organizations need to be able to keep track of money is between a collection of mostly-trusted peers. With cryptocurrencies they can ditch a lot of the transaction and accounting software.
What is blockchain technology if not even more complex accounting software? It has its uses, but a network of mostly trusted peers is probably not one of them.
I remember saying this about Google Wave: it was a solution in search of a problem. Cyrpto specifically and blockchain in general is absolutely a solution desperately in search of a problem. And I honestly think not enough people were honest about their motivations. They saw Bitcoin go through the roof and were eager to be on the next rocketship, which never happened (well, there's Ethereum but it kinda happened at the same time although it started later).
It's been a sea of shitcoins and rug pulls ever since. Anyone rmemeber NFTs? Just another scam on top of a scam to sell more crypto.
Sometimes there's an advantage to an outsider's perspective on a problem space. It's the essence of disruption. But way more often than not, it's just snake oil salesman looking for a quick buck. And trying to disrupt the financial system without understanding it has shown itself to be a dismal failure, kinda like the graveyard of "Google killer" search engines in the 2000s and early 2010s.
because fiat can be taken away from you.
It's just LARPing.
Usually LARPers are conscious that they don't have magic or any sword skills. I'm pretty sure the person who you respond too really think what he wrote.
Seems they were having trouble "taking it away by the justice system."
For the same reason government across the world have pressured or banned exchangers of monero.
It can just be a smart contract with overcollaterised crypto backing it. And the idea is kind of genius.
All the USDT and USDC which appeared later on a just "proxy" for "real" dollar hold by Tether or Circle. There is nothing permissionless or decentralized about them.
So "stablecoin" can mean very different things in practice.
But all I know is that the only reason why some of my friends are able to work remotely from their country is crypto currency as that is the only way they're able to get paid without 30% to 40% being lost in fees as well as being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight. They work real, productive swe jobs and earn enough to support not only themselves, but everyone around them as well making the place they live in a tiny bit better.
You are not even getting rid of that, you are just replacing them with a different set of middlemen in the crypto ecosystem who are demanding substantially higher fees than, say, a Wise does.
Notice that the parent comment didn't use the word replacing.
Wise is even worse than "zero-fee" stock trading platforms like Robin hood who do payment for order flow. At least PFOF is more competitive and regulated and you're only getting a few basis points stolen from you instead of like 80 basis points.
A question though: How do they exchange their crypto into local fiat?
Energy consumption isn't the problem. It's how the energy is generated that is relevant to planetary health, and even then, whose to say the tradeoff isn't worth it. Crypto mining is estimated to take up 3% at most which means 97% is spent on other things. What makes this other 97% more worthy of this energy than crypto mining? The fact you don't see it as valuable?
Also many mining operations take advantage of stranded energy, so energy that would go to waste if not used for on-site mining.
30% lost in fees??
Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere?
Also:
> being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight
I for sure put crypto in this same category. “Stablecoin” or not.
Outside the West, the answer is quite often "no". And trying to open an account in the US from outside will run into ID+residency requirements.
If you want to do financial crimes and fraud, you can't (or at least, shouldn't) really do this.
Unspoken by the parent poster is that in practice these people are usually using crypto to break the law in some way, which is why it's valuable to them.
Another way to mitigate this scam is wise revolut etc. But they are also mostly western
Which country will take 30% cut from incoming foreign transaction? The highest combined fees I could find are for Sub-Saharan Africa and those are below 10%, supporting tax/social evasion claim.
Could be completely legal but when folks don't provide details its often safe to assume the worse scenario when it comes to money, taxation and screwing the government.
It's harder, if not impossible, if you've been got the wrong set of papers, or are missing them.
> this same category. “Stablecoin” or not.
Like it or not, USDC and USDT do seem to actually be stable. They've been pegged to the dollar for a while now, with increased scrutiny.
There are transaction fees so you're still paying someone. And the it's not government taking what you own, it's scammers!
- Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out.
- Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he can get a huge (fiat-denominated) exit. Stablecoins are basically the only crypto innovation of note that have achieved PMF.
Don't confuse the former for the latter!
This isn’t to say that the entertainment industry hasn’t pulled some awful shenanigans. But they’re generally willing to sell to as many people as are willing to pay the price they set. For the most part they haven’t tried to place hard limits on how many total people are allowed to watch a movie and control it with some sort of limited edition resellable token. That was an innovation of the NFT folks.
yay?
The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs.
Just dig into [0].
Is the Ethereum Foundation and broader project dedicated to pumping the cryptocurrency ETH? obviously not and they are not by far the top holder of it.
The fact that the crypto is not providing real returns is actually one of the main criticism of the project.
People’s opinion is the ultimate law. If you find a loophole in a contract that gives you everybody’s money, people will just take it back.
It's like war: We don't like war, we don't like people being killed, but man, the amount of technology progress made during war is good.
So, even if you hate crypto; the fact that it is enabling research in cryptographic theory (even if for stupid goals) is good.
Scarcity is not a virtue.
accomplishment? like, something big and good?
Valve hired economist and future politician Yanis Varoufakis in 2012, when Bitcoin was well below $1000, to study "in-game economies" (i.e. digital scarcity) because it was such a big deal in their existing online games.
I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?
Stablecoins are not backed by a central bank. Instead their source of value comes from a private company that holds actual US dollars or USD-equivalent reserves (like treasury bills, etc).
3-4% of billions (USDC alone is $80 billion) would itself be billions of dollars of annual interest. Easily covering the operating cost of these companies.
However, they don’t keep it all. Nobody is going to let you hold their cash in size without getting a slice of the interest. All the big players (like an exchange holding USDC of its patrons) cut deals with the stable coin issuers for a revenue split of that interest.
Stablecoins for the first time offer a reasonable way for the global poor to store value in dollars, or in the form of any relatively stable currency.
Obviously this comes with all kinds of issues, but it's still better than the original situation where "savings" simply didn't exist except in the form of physical dollars or gold bought at a significant premium.
tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then. You don't want to try the devil's lettuce cause in 2 years you will be a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, or worse!
- many people don't indulge at all
- many people indulge occasionally to no real harm
- some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess
- a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm
- a few people really mess up tragically
> assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few")
I was trying to be as vague as possible here!
__ ¹ coincidentally what my Dad always used to say about black tar heroin.
Well, propaganda or not, hard drugs are bad for you.
Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.
You can say buying crypto is like gambling sure but it literally is not. It's investing in an extremely risky asset that can go to 0. But it is very different than placing a bit on Kalshi or a sportsbook.
I actually have bought CumRocket before but I also bought a lot of crypto and sold it at a profit. I did not use Kalshi later or sportbooks to gamble. I moved to invest in stocks later in life but bought boring etfs and index funds. Trading bitcoin actually taught me risk management and stocks seem much easier to handle in terms of strategy.
Sure I could've turned into a degenrate gambler but that's literally not crypto's fault
The show doesn’t really rely on not knowing the twist. And even saying there’s a spoiler for season 1 will probably clue most people onto what the twist is anyway
But honestly I feel the Darkest Timeline is more apt, ala Community.
(WARNING: The above comic contains the same spoiler as the article, more or less.)
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
edit: Ah, I see. You left this comment after having your last response flagged.
I used to think it was merely an innocent ignorance, just a soft subject that technologists weren’t familiar with. But anymore it seems like actively hostile to me, a kind of blind belief in the idea that technological problems will just be magically solved by adding more technology.
Not to say that all who love technology are outcasts, but hoping for reaching the ones behaving problematically by talking about the academic sport of philosophy or related disciplines doesn't seem effective if the goal is more pro-social behaviour.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-st...
> The private interest is genuine, a global market's appetite for a frictionless way to hold dollars, captured by the saver who holds the token and the issuer who books the reserves. The cost is paid by everyone outside that transaction. What looks rational for the individual Nigerian saver is corrosive for Nigeria.
The way this is framed by the author is something like "poor $COUNTRY central bank has its citizens best interests at heart but evil stablecoins are tying the poor central bank's hands". The reality could not be farther from truth. In countries mentioned in the article like Argentina, Turkey or Nigeria the governments are incredibly corrupt and they use monetary policy and capital controls to make loads of cheap financing available to the ultra rich while inflating their debts away. The net effect is that in these countries the combination of inflation and currency debasement is used as a direct wealth siphon from the middle/upper middle class to the ultra rich (the poor have no savings and therefore are less affected). As a result the middle and upper middle classes of these countries entirely evaporated in the last 10-15 years.
Stablecoins are not the issue here, the governments are.
I hate these type of articles because they often come from people that live in a normal country and don't know the struggle to live in a corrupt shithole where you don't have financial freedom nor security
> The private interest is genuine, [...] rational for the individual Nigerian saver
You expand upon that rationale. It is individually rational precisely because of corruption, incompetence, external sanctions and many other situations across the world.
This choice is corrosive for Nigeria regardless of whether the Nigerian government is benevolent or malevolent because American monetary policy is ignorant of what would be beneficial for Nigeria and the more people that make that choice the more the future of their society is tied to American monetary policy. It is an incompetent policy by construction. Now you have two problems: corruption, and an inability to effect monetary policy.
You might think, well if and when we solve the corruption problem we can transfer the stable coin back to effect a monetary policy... triggering the run that will drop the peg because the private entities backing the coin aren't regulated like a bank. Although comically, maybe the American taxpayer will then bail out the entity and the Nigerians will get their money!
1.A tiny handful of success stories are pushed to the front.
2.The vast majority who lost money are made invisible.
3.It manufactures the expectation that this time, you could be the one.
4.The price movement itself becomes the reward stimulus.
5.The platform, the exchange, the issuer, and the early investors all hold an advantage in fees or liquidity.
The problem is that this is identical to gambling. But it's dressed up as "finance." The industry obscures the fact that crypto functions as gambling by making people think of it as a new kind of financial asset.
Of course, crypto is technology. It's true that there are technological components, blockchains, smart contracts, and the like. But just because something contains technology doesn't mean the mass marketing around it qualifies as technology investment. Anti-counterfeiting technology is also technology. That doesn't make putting money into circulating counterfeit bills an "investment in currency security technology." By the same logic, the fact that crypto contains technological elements is being used to justify the marketing structure built on top of it, and that, precisely, is the deception.
And for all the talk of decentralization, the reality that USDT and similar tokens end up tethered to a single dominant exchange, heavily coupled to nation states, essentially proves that true decentralization is impossible in practice. This is only natural. Decentralization makes trading inconvenient, so people gravitate toward a single centralized exchange. And at that point, what exactly is the difference between that exchange and a government?
How many teenagers looked with starry eyes into US military recruiting PR campaigns, then get send to Iraq / Afghanistan, and instead of glory and cool adventures that were promised they saw death of peers and civilians on massive scale, they became invaders for at best questionable causes, experienced huge human suffering and destruction... which at the end didn't achieve anything positive at all, neither for US nor for locals, massively in contrary. Heroes look very differently in hindsight.
"This guy won big!" is absolutely a part of the marketing that pulls in the other suckers. It's not a counter-example, it's part of the scheme.
I know people who really enjoy a night out losing a 3-digit sum of money in a casino. Somehow they get sufficient reward from that to make the expense worthwhile for them.
The difference is, that unlike the Crypto enthusiasts, they don't afterwards try to convince me at length that gambling can and should replace money transfers, foreign exchange, banks in general, pension funds, the governmental exchequer etc. That would be cultish lunacy.
But I must contradict the author, because there is a market of goods, and bitcoin is indirectly involved in it. Namely the dark web market of drugs.
People love drugs, and they use a lot of them, drugs turnover a huge amount of value. And right now people are buying bitcoin, because it's often safe to buy, and exchanging it for monero, that they then use to buy drugs.
I'm very much interested in this market, and how it affects crypto.
They're not without value and theyre not all speculation but what value they do have is almost entirely about facilitating transactions which at least one state considers illegal.
I used to think that this would mean that they'd be outright banned eventually but it seems that the "index tracker for the underground economy" proved to be too profitable an investment for western oligarchs and the chance to undermine rival countries' capital controls proved too alluring for the imperialists in government.
But at the same time there is also finally real finance happening on-chain too. Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage. I think Coinbase announced their on-chain equity offering will have the same capability. Just yesterday Bailie Gifford launched a tokenised fund where the actual register of record is on-chain. I still think crypto has significant potential as financial rails, and that does seem to be being explored by real financial players now too.
Yes it won't be quite so decentralised, but say a number of major banks all spin up a node for say a JPM asset trading blockchain, it becomes semi-decentralised, so they have some advantage of a using a more secure shared ledger, but they also retain more control and thus probably more acceptance within banking, as big players can keep a walled-garden of sorts.
What is the actual societal value of this? Do you seriously believe that such a token helps price discovery?
It also doesn't solve a problem we haven already solved; If i buy something, companies are quite aware how this default contract works and what are up and downside of doing business with someone.
In smart contracts you remove the trust these people build and now come up with another mechanism. The latest i'm aware of is blocking capital from both sides until transaction is done. This binds a lot more capital on both sides which might be a huge problem for a small company vs. a big one, it could alos kill one party if the other party never accepts any resolution.
A current LLM with a credit card an already just buy something and everything in the background works as it has for a long time.
And now the crypto bros are still talking… to each other. Still looking at the price of Bitcoin obsessively. And the rest of us hardly ever hear about it.
Perhaps it is actually useful to some people.
At least the pressure on the financial market, GPU shortage through AI, AI we have a realistic chance that crashes more and more.
This is an interesting economic/philosophical angle. What is the logical conclusion of this? What happens as a higher fraction of people deploy their capital in zero-sum games? Is "deployment" even the right framing? A bet doesn't necessarily "tie up" capital in the same way as a real investment (you could place your bet moments before it's settled). Buying crypto does tie up capital, sort of, although in theory you could invest crypto-denominated assets into something productive.
My capital is in real estate and (mostly US tech) company equity. Is society actually better off because I put my capital there instead of letting it sit in a bank account or crypto wallet?
You buy crypto and give out fiat. Now you have apparently 1 crypto worth 1 fiat and someone else now has 1 fiat.
Cryptography came first and has millions of practical applications, and will only become more frequent fodder for discussion as quantum computing advances. If any discipline deserves claim to "crypto" it's -graphy.
(I'd also accept cryptozoology as the one true 'crypto')
As we have seen with Stripe [0], Shopify [1], PayPal [2] and many others have all figured out its utility is in stablecoins like USDC, which you can send them worldwide, same day, 24/7 in seconds close to $0 with no room for speculation and pay for things and soon agents will do the same. [3]
We get that the author is still upset about Cardano ruining his own crypto startup (Adjoint Inc.) in 2017, but I think we are way past the "crypto is scam" chantings and the companies that I mentioned would agree.
[0] https://stripe.com/en-es/payment-method/stablecoins-and-cryp...
[1] https://www.shopify.com/news/stablecoins-on-shopify
[2] https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto...
The stable coins in question are absolut idiotic. You can't just have billions and trillions of dollars/euros/fiat in some bank and not do anything with it while everyone else is using your stable coins.
It motivates these companes to invest the fiat they have to hold, which adds risk which wasn't there before.
Just make it a real digital fiat from central banks.
But than what did you win? Instead of having your banking ssystem in place with certifications, bank licenses etc. you have nothing to replace it with just bare digital fiat.
Smart contracts don't work.
Now what? a new whole parallel ecosystem? For what?
FTX collapsed and was caught but more conservative crypto exchanges continue to use customer funds, trade against their own customers, use insider information, etc.
Even a supposedly "legitimate" exchange like Coinbase is allowing unregistered securities to trade on its platform.
Yes, and not just in crypto. People have started to view a high-trust society like a rainforest: a natural resource that has lots of life-sustaining positive externalities, but you can just burn it down to make a quick buck instead. This has been bad since the GFC, and accelerated by the modern rightwing influence sphere.
There's a very real tendency to people to go "I don't trust mainstream source <X> for <slightly valid reason in one case>", and then immediately jump to totally trusting some random youtube or tiktok conspiracy theorist.
I've never read this analogy before but it really works for me. Thanks!
I'm always interested to see how anti-crypto people try to differentiate gold from crypto, and so far I've never seen anything convincing. Gold's industrial utility as a good electrical conductor could not have begun before electricity was discovered, but it was valued just as highly for millennia before that. The "monetary role thousands of years old" claim has no force at all, because it does not even attempt to explain what it is about gold that caused it to acquire this role -- and identifying some relevant property of gold that crypto lacks is a prerequisite of any argument that attempts to differentiate the two.
How is this not the coolest shit ever?
Without this it's always just a something to speculate on and shift "real" money with.
> The price of Bitcoin measures only the price of Bitcoin.
1. Why must an industry provide public good? How do you define public good? If it must, can your claim be proved objectively without relying on feels? All these articles decrying gambling, crypto and prediction markets are begging this one simple question.
2. Why must exchanges be split up? The whole trading industry is based on trading against each other for estimated personal gain. This is the definition of trading, whether cows, binary crypto options or bets on an orange man’s Xs. Exchanges’ trading against the client isn’t endemic only to crypto. Look at all the CFD and spread betting brokers. There are all sorts of techniques.
Bingo.
OTOH i think it damaged the ecosystem that US president decided to be "the most pro-crypto president". Obviously nobody wants that.
2. 2026? Cryptocurrency was always just hell. Well, before it was hell it was LARP.
I can’t help but think Bitcoin carries a floor for criminal activity. It will always be valuable.
Thankfully, the rampant fraud and scams have made it obvious to most people, with LLM hype now drowning out the siren song that captivates people vulnerable to FOMO of the week.
Gibson isn't really that kind of dystopian. And the Good Place reference makes no sense. The article reads like those old Time Magazine pieces by some baby boomer breathlessly trying to scare other old people.
Just yesterday the US president has Tweeted the he "loves bombing the shit out of Iran".
The language is disgusting, what's happening is disgusting, from prediction markets and their disgusting shills/cultists trying to sell you that price discovery has positive social impact, politicians and administrations blatantly involved in scams and corruption, the US threatening its allies, civil liberties and privacy more and more dying around the world, the US kidnapping foreign leaders and half the world clapping and pretending it's not happening.
Every day there's more animosity, nationalism, protectionism, people blaming globalism ignoring the huge benefits and prosperity it brought, computer algorithms (AI) quickly eroding the only positive and creative edge humans really had.
It's just sad to see the state of the affairs and the increasingly selfish direction the world is taking.
Or rather, a totally outrageous parody of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. If this wasn't real, I probably couldn't stop laughing about it. But unfortunately, it is...
Author is at times a little too emphatic, but he has some sentences like this one that are really efficient in conveying the idea.
More news at 11!
The irony is his background as a former "blockchain" startup founder, right during that mid-2010s era when people who missed the early Bitcoin boat desperately tried to make "enterprise blockchain" happen. It reads like a severe case of cognitive dissonance reduction. Having spent years trying to make the wrong iteration of the tech happen while missing the actual wave, he embarked on an endless crusade to manifest a collapse just to retroactively validate his own poor decisions.